Lubna Mathur was referring to Diya’s interview with Cosmo earlier in the day—the very interview in which she’d found out just how diabolical her father was. Her mother caught sight of her distraught face, and instantly, sleep vanished from her eyes.
“What’s happened? What’s wrong?” she asked, feeling Diya’s forehead for a fever. “Are you ill? Your face is red.”
“I’m going to kill him, and you won’t stop me today. How dare he! How dare he interfere in my business!” She slipped past her mother and into her parents’ bedroom.
By then, Kamal Mathur had woken up from his afternoon nap and was sitting up in bed, blinking sleep from his eyes like a wise, old owl. A handsome one at that.
Diya loved her father very much. But he had to die.
“What’s this about an engagement party?”
“What about it?” her father asked, yawning noisily. “I’ve booked the Grand Hyatt for the ninth of March. Krish will be here by the seventh.” Her father stood up and stretched. His at-home attire, a cream-colored kurta-pajama, was utterly creased.
Diya poked her father hard in his belly.
He jerked in shock and finally noticed her livid face. “Are you okay, baby?”
“No! You have ruined my life,” she wailed and flounced away.
“What have you done? Why do you never listen, Kamal?” her mother railed at her husband.
Her father actually had the audacity to look wounded.
“Don’t you dare pretend we’re the evil ones. You’re not even sorry for what you’ve done,” Diya said, clutching her head with both hands. “Daddy, please. Stay out of this. I know what I’m doing with Krish. Don’t force me to run away and never speak to you again because I will do that if you continue to manage my life. Let me handle this.”
“Pray tell me, how are you handling it when Krish says you will decide when the official engagement ceremony will take place, and you say, ‘Not now’?”
“It means that the decision is in my hands, and I have decided now is not the time,” Diya bit out through clenched teeth.
“What the hell do you mean by that? If not now, then when?” her father bellowed. “You are thirty years old!”
Diya looked up at the rotating ceiling fan and groaned. It was crazy hot in Mumbai, and she felt the heat and humidity even more after Dallas and Istanbul. The cotton day dress she wore had wilted as soon as she put it on. Thank heavens she’d taken a change of clothes for the interview. She should stick with shorts and tanks for a few days. To hell with fashion in this heat.
“I don’t want him at all if you force an engagement on us. Got it, Daddy? You have already messed up everything by your drama. Now, stay out of it.”
She pecked her father on his cheek to soothe the sting of her harsh words while he sputtered nonsense about the family name getting dragged through the mud because of her shenanigans. She hugged her mother and sailed out of the room as her father continued to holler threats at her back. The threats, she noticed, were vaguely similar to the ones she’d just issued against him.
“She’s mad!” he yelled, his voice stiff with injured, do-gooder pride. “I am helping the idiots.”
“They don’t need your help,” her mother responded with utter unflappability.
“Ha! Without my help, they would never have …”
Diya paused in the doorway of her own room, which lay directly across from theirs. She made a U-turn and stormed back inside.
“Never have what, Daddy? What do Krish and I have between us besides a broken engagement and some family connections? And, now, you’ve ruined everything by your interference. How will I ever know whether he wants to marry me because he truly loves me or because of the pressure your pathetic blubbering put on him? I won’t be anyone’s obligation. I won’t.”
Diya wouldn’t put it past Krish to have done just that. To save her reputation, to salvage her family’s honor were reasons enough to explain Krish’s sudden change of heart. He felt obligated to her father. Each man held the other in the highest respect. Each man filled a space in the other’s life that was missing. Daddy had sponsored Krish’s education. Yes, Krish had paid Daddy back in full, possibly with interest, but it didn’t mean he felt any less indebted.
“Stay out of my life, please.” Diya had said those words to her father many times before. This time though, he knew she meant them.
* * *
“Didn’t you get knocked up by some Arab?”
Diya burped and shot an extremely malevolent look at Shankara Munshi, the utterer of those awful words, before she turned to Leesha in bafflement. “Why is she here?”
“Because, until our mutual client gets a rousing victory in court, Alisha and I are inseparable,” Shanky answered in Leesha’s stead.
Shanky, a social activist for women’s issues and a regular migraine inspirer, had butted into Leesha’s home uninvited, like she’d butted into the conversation.
The three of them made a lopsided triangle around the granite coffee table in Leesha and Aryan’s eco-friendly apartment that Aryan had designed, sharing vada pavs bought from the food vendor below the building. Sprawled on a shaggy white-and-espresso-toned carpet, Diya had gorged on two whole vada pavs already and three glasses of prime vino. She was probably going to get zits on her face and a bad stomach because of the fried food, and she’d gleefully lay the tragedy at the Beast’s doorstep, too. Diya hadn’t spilled her tragic tale yet, not wanting Shanky to bear witness to her patheticness.
“You’re exactly his type.” Diya examined voluptuous Shanky up close. The woman was wearing baggy jeans and a jaundice-yellow top. Ugh.
Shanky looked oh-so condescendingly down at Diya—only because she was sitting on the sofa and Diya was on the floor. “I’m going to assume you’re not talking about my blood type here.”
Leesha sniggered but stopped when both Diya and Shanky glared at her.
Shanky was a big-time blood donor, apparently. And a social crusader fighting against sex trafficking. And she raised money for breast cancer through fundraisers.
Now, hold on tight! There was no need to start playing a harpsichord and crowning Shanky’s head with a halo. She was no saint. But Diya had to admit, Shanky had balls.
“He totally goes for big boobs, big butt, short women. Your disgusting color coordination in apparel is another tick mark in your favor. Plus, you’re kind of pretty. Shave your arms and your mustache, darling. Thread your eyebrows. Get a facial, woman.”
Diya blinked, imagining Shanky all well groomed and chic. It was an amazing before-and-after transformation taking place inside her head—a different beast turning into a hairless beauty. Go figure!
“Come to think of it, if you got all spruced up, I’d go for you too. And I’m not even semi-gay,” she added.
Leesha burst into guffaws this time and laughed long enough that she started hiccuping. Leesha hiccuped when she laughed too much. See? Everyone had problems—big or hiccup-sized or beastly.
“What a vain and senseless thing to say. Can’t say I expected any better from the brainless Beauty,” Shanky jeered.
She wasn’t tipsy at all. And, as Leesha was mostly a teetotaler, she wasn’t either.
So unfair, Diya grumbled to herself.
“Let’s get back to what I said before your unasked for tipani on my body hair. If you’re preggers by some man who won’t marry you, why not marry Alisha’s brother since he’s offered to save your ass?” Shanky gazed at Diya as if she were a lab experiment gone haywire.
“If you don’t want my two tipani’s worth of advice, I don’t need yours either. I only take advice from my BFF,” declared Diya and looked pleadingly at her best friend. “I’m right, right?”
“About what exactly?” Leesha mumbled, her hand hovering over her laptop.
“Wait,” Shanky butted in again. She really had abysmal manners. “Are you pregnant or not?”
Before Diya could fabricate another miscarriage—her eighth one, last count of t
he media—Leesha enlightened Shanky. “She’s not, and she never has been. Let me clue you in on one of the best-kept secrets or best-played charades of the century—Diya is a virgin. Apparently, if a guy cannot make her shiver, then he’s not worth sleeping with, and no guy has made her shiver besides my idiot brother, but she won’t sleep with him until he morphs into Prince Charming.”
In a nutshell and then some.
“What?” Shanky’s thick, wormy eyebrows came together in the middle of her forehead. Concentrating on them made Diya’s eyes cross.
“Dee’s got scruples. Amazing, isn’t it?” Leesha grinned like the cat that had swallowed a canary.
Diya burped again, too woebegone to bother shushing Leesha’s runaway mouth. “I’ll only sleep with him if he really, truly loves me and cannot live without me and not because of some obligation he feels for my father.”
“Wait. Your father wants him to sleep with you? That’s disgusting.”
Leesha shushed Shanky for being stupid and then said, “I don’t think Krish feels any such obligation, Dee.”
“You’re wrong.” It was pathetic to be an obligation and not the love of someone’s life.
“Is that why you broke it off last time?” Leesha’s eyes were like the Beast’s—big and brown and just lovely. She didn’t have specs though.
“He didn’t want me. He wouldn’t kiss me,” Diya whined, ignoring Shanky’s horse-like snort. “And he has … issues.”
“Who doesn’t?” This from Shanky.
“It’s guilt, too.” The admission sent a rush of pain through her heart. “I told him I loved him. I told him that I would never marry anyone else because of him. How else was he supposed to react? I practically trapped him into an affair … and I’m not even his type!” Then, she divulged just how far she’d fallen. She told them about the bootie. “I got one for myself, too. And, that Sunday in Dallas, I performed voodoo with it.”
Leesha blinked in astonishment. “Come again?”
“Remember the tantric we met in Pune years and years ago? He taught us a chant to make our wishes come true. We had to choose an object of desire, put the talisman at Lord Vishnu’s feet, and pray over it. I did all that, and it all came true. Leesha, I’ve lured your brother into my clutches with a love spell,” she wailed, nearly in tears.
For a moment, there was total silence in the room. Then, Shanky started laughing like a hyena, and Leesha hiccuped her heart out. Diya was too heartbroken and distressed to get angry with them. Leesha smacked Diya on her head, calling her an idiot. It was a mean, mean world when even your BFF turned on you.
The hyena gasped, “Oh, please, let me handle this.” She grabbed hold of Diya’s shoulders and shook her hard. “Idiot woman, are you so desperate to battle some fantasy dragon that you’re inventing problems for yourself? Just accept it, Diya. You’re a ridiculously lucky individual whose every wish in life has come true. Accept it. Enjoy it. Appreciate it. Be grateful for it. And maybe the world will resent you a little less.”
“She’s right, Dee. Grab it all and enjoy it while you can. You never know when your luck will change.” There was a doom in Leesha’s voice that had been missing for more than a year. The pre-Aryan Leesha had been a doomsday predictor, not the post-Aryan one.
Diya stared at her BFF. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
Something was definitely off with Leesha now that she thought about it. Aryan had been moody, too, earlier this evening when Diya barged in on them, all mad because of her father. When Shanky had arrived, Aryan had excused himself to go to the gym, and from there, he’d visit his grandmother and uncle who lived a few streets away. He’d laughingly said that he was happy to make himself scarce, so the ladies could have their little bitch-fest in peace. But his laugh had sounded forced. False.
“Nothing is wrong exactly.” Leesha darted a hesitant look in Shanky’s direction.
For once, Shanky took the hint. “I see we won’t be doing any work tonight, so I’ll head home and feed the rats and the cockroaches their dinner. Poor things must be starving.” She made to get up, but Leesha caught her arm.
“No, Shankara, stay. It’s okay, really.”
Diya stared. Since when did Leesha consider Shanky a confidant? Diya’s heart burned, but she immediately felt awful for feeling jealous, so she drank more vino.
“We had a consultation with Priya last week,” Leesha began.
Diya interrupted her with a whoop. “You’re pregnant! I knew it! I knew the bootie would work.” Diya crawled around the table and hugged Leesha hard.
“Actually, it didn’t. We went to see Priya because I’m not getting pregnant. She wants us to do some tests. Just some routine tests to see if everything is as it should be. Aryan has freaked out. He’s jumped to the conclusion that we’re going to have issues conceiving like his parents did after his birth … and what came after.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Oh, she was a bad person, such a terrible friend. She’d been ranting about her life for the past how many weeks and never once asked Leesha what was going on in hers. And poor Aryan. His mother’s fertility problems and manic depression had led to one of the most traumatic events in his life. No wonder he was upset.
“There was nothing to tell, Dee. I have my hands full with Aryan right now. He’s not handling it well.”
Diya hugged Leesha again. “What can I do? Tell me. What should I do?”
Shanky had sat quietly through Leesha’s revelation. But, now, she looked at Diya in approval.
“I don’t think I need your womb just yet,” Leesha joked despite the tension radiating out of her. “Make him laugh. Distract him, Dee, because I can’t seem to be able to. Not even in bed because he’s automatically thinking … we both are … whether we’re making a baby or not.”
“Done. What else?” She vowed to call Aryan up every other hour and harass him. She’d help him shop from Scheherazade’s fall collection for men on the tablet. That would cheer him up. He was a clotheshorse, just like her.
Leesha wiggled their joined hands. “The else is, don’t waste time second-guessing my brother. Trust him to know his own mind. If he says he loves you, then he loves you.”
But it wasn’t Krish’s mind she didn’t trust. It was her own heart Diya couldn’t trust.
Chapter 20
Three weeks later, Krish Menon arrived in his birth city against the express wishes of his reluctant fiancée.
Ex-fiancée. She’d ditched him. Again.
He stood for a brief moment outside the Arrivals terminal, basking in the hot, humid, strangely pungent air and the waves of humanity surging in and out of the airport like the tide on Chowpatty Beach.
Usually, his welcome committee was comprised of Amma, Alisha, Vallima, and Diya. This time, only his aaliyan—brother-in-law—had come to fetch him, and Krish had to make do with a hearty handshake and manly hug. He found he missed the prodigal-son-returns welcome where two of the four women—usually Vallima and Diya—would fall, weeping, into his arms and berate him for taking far too long between visits.
“Are they all mad at me?” he asked once they were ensconced in Aryan’s BMW and the chauffeur—a turbaned sardar named Singh—steered the car out of the airport.
Aryan grinned. “In varying degrees. You should have kept your mouth shut over the photo, old chap. Not cool. No matter how angry she made you.”
Krish closed his eyes as irritation and embarrassment stabbed at his insides. That was the problem in a mostly female household—nothing remained secret for long. And when you brought Beauty Mathur into the picture …
Three days ago, a photo of Diya lip-locked with a mystery man on a yacht had hit the global newsstands, and like any normal jilted fiancé, he’d lost his head.
“Exactly what kind of fashion move prompted you to allow the man to stick his tongue so deep inside your throat that he was licking your navel from the inside?” he’d snarled over the phone.
Diya had responded
in kind, and then the fight, the accusations, the need to destroy each other with words had overridden all civility. He’d called her an unfaithful, promiscuous bitch. She’d called him an invidious, lily-livered bastard.
Aryan was right. He should have kept his mouth shut.
Diya’s stubbornness to not commit to him was frustrating them both. Didn’t she see that?
Krish looked out the window, where vehicle upon vehicle pooled around the Beemer, hampering their progress into town. It was one in the morning, and yet there was traffic on the Mumbai roads, the city that never slept.
Maybe Diya was right. Maybe they were just too different to make it work. She’d warned him what her world would be like. It was his mistake that he hadn’t taken her seriously.
Kissing another man had been a test—he knew that now—a test he’d failed.
“What do women want?” he asked aloud.
It was a rhetorical question, the kind a man might throw into the wind, preferably over a glass of whiskey in the dead of night, but Aryan answered anyway, “They want your body first. Then, your mind, your heart, your soul, and finally, your sperm in a cup.”
Krish thanked God his sense of humor hadn’t left him. “Tiff with Alisha?” he asked, chuckling.
Aryan sighed. Shrugged. “Just one of those married-couple conflicts.”
“Unmarried ones get into conflict, too,” Krish pointed out with a huge yawn.
He hadn’t slept in three days and had traveled eight thousand miles to get there. It was a good thing Diya wasn’t in town. He hadn’t the energy for a boxing match tonight. She was in Dubai, then Paris after two days, and then she flew to Riyadh for Hasaan’s wedding next week.
Krish fell asleep for the rest of the drive and woke up when they reached home. Alisha and he co-owned a flat in a building in South Mumbai. It lay empty now since she’d married and moved into Aryan’s Bandra flat.
He followed Aryan into the building, leaving the chauffeur and the liftman to tackle his luggage and bring it up to the flat. It amazed him that, within moments of standing on his home soil, he could readily relinquish the autonomy he proudly exercised in Dallas.
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